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"A day after watching that episode, my wouldn't eat his cucumber and tomatoes."

Another anxious mother wrote: "My daughter keeps saying 'No' and 'Yuk' in a really high and mighty way, just like Peppa does, and generally answering back when I ask her to do something.

"Shall I ban Peppa Pig, or is that being totally unreasonable?"

Psychologist Dr Aric Sigman said in recent years there had been a "significant increase" in children using "adversarial, snide, questioning, confrontational and disrespectful behaviour", which he attributed to cartoons.

"There is nothing special about Peppa Pig - the same applies to all programmes. Some 80 per cent of brain development is between birth and three years old, so if they spend a lot of time watching the TV, they will copy the forms of behaviours that they see on the TV," he told the Daily Mail.

"The problem is you can't distinguish to children what is real and pretend. You can't just say to the child the pig was only pretending to be naughty."